Digitizing the Supply Chain

Digitizing the supply chain is continuing to unfold. In the past week, I’ve spoken to a few organizations about their progress to create the digital supply chain – running the gamut from getting it started in earnest, to full on using it. One thing was clear – no plans are in place to change the measures of performance. As one interviewee said, “the only change we see is the speed at which we are able to report performance, not the measures we’re using.”

One APQC member was recently in the news regarding what they’re now able to do with sensors. Marty Groover, the operational technology leader at Caterpillar, was quoted in the article Four SAP Customers Share Digital Transformation Journey stating that “sensors on forklifts are just the beginning. We’re also doing predictive maintenance using sensor collected data from our machines. With this kind of machine learning, we can understand where something will fail before it happens.”

Another member said to be successful in using these new technologies you must start with laying the foundation for using quality data and being able to analyze it. That requires a data-driven culture. However many supply chains have a long way to go for data and analytics capabilities. The Analytics in Supply Chain research will give you an idea of where organizations are at using analytics in the supply chain.